What Houston Traffic Taught Me about My Career

In all of the other places I’ve lived before moving to Houston, I had been considered an aggressive, impatient driver. I averaged 10 mph over the speed limit, changed lanes often to go around other drivers, and had daily one-sided conversations with other drivers that thankfully could not hear my frustration at their inability to just go the speed limit. When I moved, Houston was a wake-up call. I was thrust into an amount of traffic I had never experienced—so many people and cars everywhere, all wanting to go faster. I suddenly did not drive fast enough. I learned that it is completely acceptable to exit on the far right from the left-hand lane on a major artery by going across four lanes of traffic at once, and no one blinked an eye because sometimes that’s just how you need to exit. I even came to realize that there are three versions of honking depending on what message you want to communicate, as well as your anger level.

After just a few months of forcing myself to explore the city, all of this began to change my perspective on something as mundane and regular as driving. Now my driving state of mind is prepared for people exiting across three lanes of traffic in rush hour, cars merging into my lane without notice—apparently they don’t sell cars with blinkers in Texas—and having a conversation with another car via honks (a dictionary is still in the works). I learned that we have to adapt as we change aspects of our lives, and sometimes that can be a simple change, like how to interact in traffic to survive your drive. Aside from improving my driving, Houston traffic has taught me a lot about how to adapt to change in my career. And some days I’m even thankful that my 25-minute commute is as hectic as it is with all that it has taught me.

It takes all kinds to make the world go round.

Houston traffic is aggressive. If you leave your blinker on for more than two seconds, the car behind you will take your spot, but that doesn’t mean that all drivers are that way. Like all cities, there is a good amount of slow, passive drivers as well. There are fast drivers, slow drivers, good drivers, and bad drivers. The roads are full of rubberneckers, tailgaters, considerate drivers, and flat-out jerks. Traffic takes all kinds for it to be traffic, and that’s what makes rush hour the joy that it is: no one drives the same way but we have to learn how to get along to get where we are going. A company is the same way. No one will be the same kind of employee as you, no matter how much you have in common. There will always be something that makes you different in the same way that there will always be those stereotypes that The Office employs to relate to the work day. It’s easier to accept the fact that these personalities make your office what it is than trying to figure out how to become clones of each other. Getting home is a little easier with that fact in the back of your mind.

Aggressive is good; so is passive—just make certain you are in the right lane for it.

In the same vein, it is good for you to be who you are without apology. I’m an aggressive driver, so I stay in the fast lane because I want to get where I’m going. That’s what fast drivers are supposed to do. My biggest pet peeve is when I am in the correct lane for my driving preferences and I end up behind someone who is not even going the speed limit. That person is not paying attention to the drivers around him or the conventional understanding that faster traffic stays left and slower traffic stays right. He is impeding on my ability to drive how I want to drive and slows me down, affecting my results. You are who you are, and you should embrace that—but do so in a way that is effective for everyone. Again, it takes all kinds for the office to work, but work in a way that is efficient for everyone. Don’t change things up or ignore conventions just for the sake of your own comfort if it doesn’t work for everyone.

Sometimes you just have to wait and pay your dues.

One of my partner’s best friends got married this past spring. My partner was a bridesmaid and so she spent the night with the wedding party on the nearby island of Galveston where the wedding was taking place; I stayed behind in Houston for work and drove down the next day to meet her for ceremony. The primary route onto the island, which is a major tourist attraction during the summer, is the causeway, a 1.5 mile bridge with three lanes of traffic on both north- and southbound sides. It is designed to allow a lot of traffic to flow in both directions.

One of the misconceptions I had about Houston when I first moved here was that the layout of the roadways had to be designed very well to manage all the traffic. While this is true on some roads, the causeway is an epitomic example of how some areas are in no way thought through. Just before I began my drive, a two-car accident occurred where the causeway empties onto the island, backing up traffic in all three lanes for three and a half miles. I hit the back of the standstill traffic with certainty that the island or city had prepared for this situation—it couldn’t be the first time in 100 years that this happened—and traffic would begin flowing again soon. Unfortunately, the only other route onto the island is practically on the other side and takes almost two hours to complete, and there is no way to get off the causeway once you are on it; they had not designed the main entrance onto the island for such a situation. After an hour and twenty-three minutes of creeping over the Bay of Galveston, I reached the end of the causeway and drove straight past the church to the reception. I had completely missed the wedding along with nearly a quarter of the other guests.

That’s simply part of driving in Houston (and Galveston). There was nothing I could do to avoid it. If I had left earlier, I might have missed the accident and traffic, but that was an unforeseeable issue. Like every other day, I had planned for aggressive drivers, slow lanes, the occasional lost tourist blocking my lane, and I had taken measures to accommodate those—but an hour-and-twenty-three-minute delay was completely unexpected. So I had to adapt my plans. I had to pay my dues for living in Houston and sit with hundreds of other stuck vehicles. The same is true of work. Unexpected delays occur, others lack planning where it is needed, one person’s emergency can impact your day, and you might miss the ceremony. The important thing to remember is that everyone else has to deal with these issues, too. You might miss the ceremony, but don’t let that keep you from enjoying the reception.

Sometimes you need to change lanes—a lot.

One thing I greatly enjoy about Houston traffic is that it is expected that you will change lanes at least three times for every mile you drive. Someone slow pulls in front of you. Your exit is on the left rather than the right. Construction is detouring your anticipated exit. Merging traffic is slowing down your lane. A tow truck is hooking up a car on the shoulder. You simply want to go faster than everyone else. It is understandable to change lanes to accommodate your situation, whether foreseeable or not. When it comes to traffic, we often find that concept easy to accept; however, for some reason when it comes to our careers, we struggle to accept the same idea. We have just as many work and life issues pop up in our careers as in traffic. You become unhappy with your environment. Your co-workers or supervisors change. Your workload increases. Your hours are cut. You start a family. Your professional investments take a backseat to your personal ones. You get a better offer. There are thousands of scenarios that can affect a decision to stay in a current position or seek a new one, and each one is unique to an employee’s situation. Sometimes it is necessary for you to change jobs more often than the old recommendation of every 5-10 years, and that is okay. Life changes, and we have to be willing to change with it.

If you don’t know where you are going, stay in the middle lane.

No matter how much I drive across Houston, I always discover a new route to somewhere. Something in my mental map of the city connects to expand my knowledge of the highways, and there are times even with GPS that I am not entirely sure of where I am in the city or where I am supposed to be on the road. I become one of those drivers who slow down to look left and right for the needed street sign or change lanes consistently as I try to judge where my exit is. I’ve discovered that in local traffic, however, it is safer to stay in the middle lane until you find your exit, even if it requires you to change lanes at the last minute to exit. The constant changing of lanes only to find I am on the wrong side of the highway and unable to make my exit is unhelpful. It is better to be patient and wait until the conditions are right for me to move toward my exit. The same is true in our careers. We might feel uncomfortable in our current lane, maybe even like we are going slower than we should be going, but that doesn’t mean an immediate change to another lane will help. If your exit is on the left and you move right at the last minute, the opportunity you were looking for is gone. You will have to go a different route to find your destination. If you aren’t sure where you want to go, stay in the middle lane until you are certain of which route you want to take.

Don’t be afraid to be proud of who you are.

I was stuck behind a very large, double-cab dually the other day. It was obvious the driver was proud of his truck—it was raised a foot or two, it was decked out with chrome, and special designs had been put over the brake lights to advertize the make. The finishing touch was the decal on the back windshield that read “Texas Born and Raised” inside the outline of a longhorn. This guy was proud to be a Texan and he wanted everyone on the road to know it. Your job should make you feel the same way. I’m not suggesting a decal on your back windshield, but being proud of what you do every day and the impact your company makes can let you stand out from the crowd. Many people view their jobs as a requirement for living and nothing more, but being proud of what you do can make people remember who you are and what you do. And that’s a great impression to leave in people’s minds.

Sometimes you just have to find your kind of crazies to know you are not crazy.

Everyone is different. It doesn’t matter how you look at it. At some point in every job you are going to encounter people you think are crazy and people are going to think it of you, too. It might be your eating habits, your need to share your personal stories with everyone who walks into your cubicle, the bright ties you always wear to work, or the way you always put a smiley face at the end of reports. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that somewhere out there is a group of crazies just like you who enjoy doing things the way you do them. They will accept you for who you are and make you realize that you are not crazy after all. You will fit in. You will belong. And you will love it. If you are one of the lucky people that have already found your group of work crazies, share the love. The rest of us are still on the road looking for ours.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn and can be found here.

Work with Me Here: Introverts in the Workplace

The trend of identifying candidates via personality assessments hasn’t yet disappeared from the workplace altogether, and there seems to be a still held pride for some people in mentioning their four-letter association. “I’m an ENTP,” say some, as if that tells us all we need to know about how to communicate and work with them. The truth behind it all is that there is some truth behind it after all, but relying solely on identifying someone as an extrovert or introvert can be damaging to relationships and actually isolate employees even more than simply leaving them alone. However, when it comes down to it, the ones who experience the strongest form of workplace judgment are those who have introverted tendencies. Surely we all know that a test, no matter how complex, cannot tell us all we need to know about our personalities—they are too intricate and unique for a set of questions to identify what makes us tick. That doesn’t mean it’s not good to try to see how we operate in our day-to-day lives and look for ways to improve our inter-office interactions, especially when we are extroverts working side-by-side with introverts.

Being an Introvert

I am most commonly categorized as an INFJ, meaning that I have introverted tendencies, often trust my intuition over observations, follow my feelings more than thinking about logical decisions, and can be somewhat judgmental when analyzing situations as opposed to seeing the prospects of new problems. When it comes down to it, those are often traits of introverts, and working with me means working with someone who must force herself to be social and who needs some time away to think things through, even at work; however, many people that we work with daily do not understand these differences in a way that embraces an introverted personality. Rather, both supervisors and co-workers often feel they need to push or teach an employee to be more social or drag her into situations that will force the employee to become more extroverted.

I worked briefly for a company that had a very social work environment where employees were encouraged to meet regularly throughout the day and build strong relationships. Meetings were laid-back with conversation often moving to personal lives where other employees showed earnest interest and didn’t hesitate to discuss any topic that came up. On some Friday afternoons they even held a small social gathering in the office to simply talk and share champagne and strawberries, and, while deadlines were important, social interaction and the continued connection with one another were at the top of the list. For an extrovert, it was an ideal environment; for an introvert like me, it was a terrifying situation.

A few weeks into my position, my supervisor asked me to start meeting with other employees for 15-30 minutes at a time to learn about their personal and professional lives, to understand what made them tick and how to best communicate with them. There were only six other employees in the office, so the time should have gone quickly and been finished in a matter of a week or two. But the idea of sitting down with a co-worker to ask about their lives and straight-forward questions about their communication style was not an easy task for me to conceive—and it felt just like that, a task rather than the opportunity that my supervisor envisioned it to be. It felt like I was forcing relationships when I knew I would build them naturally as time progressed, and stepping into a social situation of my own creation left me paralyzed. I never did accomplish a one-on-one personal meeting, and my supervisor never understood why I felt so uncomfortable with the request, why pushing me to be extroverted was a problem. Unfortunately, not knowing how to work with introverts can alienate them even further, and, when it comes to working in the office, many introverts want you to work with them, not on them.

Misunderstandings of Introversion

Dr. Marla Gottschalk gives us a list of a few ideas on how not to manage an introvert, which can be key to overcoming common office personality conflicts. As she explains, the primary difference between extroverts and introverts lies in over-stimulation, which introverts tend to experience much sooner than their counterparts. Among her recommendations are being careful not to put them on the spot and understanding that they are often quiet and need someone else to initiate communication. While these are true, a grave misconception is that all introverts need these efforts from others all of the time.

In this vein, earlier this year the Huffington Post gives us five myths about introverts, one of which is introverts never thrive on social interaction in the way extroverts do. An introvert is often thought of as being the worker who never leaves her desk, shies away from conversation at the water cooler, buries her nose in a book during lunch in the break room, and declines the invitation to the after-office dinner to opt for a meal at home alone. In some cases, the whole scenario is true, but in most cases only pieces will be an honest picture of an introvert’s personality. This simple misunderstanding of how introverts operate has effects in their personal relationships and by extension others’ expectations of their success.

Pressure to Be Extroverted

There exists the idea that, because introverts don’t do social scenarios as often or as well as extroverts, they are lacking in certain professional areas, such as networking, building strong relationships, or even characterizing authority. It is the assumption that introversion coincides with an inherent weakness in situations where social confidence would seem a necessity. In some cases, the ability to readily jump into a high-energy, social environment can be a benefit, but that does not negate any other capability, such as developing strong relationships at your own pace or in your own way. The issue actually lies in the fact that many societies, America included, pressure introverts to act like extroverts despite their unique abilities to think outside the box, analyze information well, and see beyond immediate problems. We don’t view introversion as a good thing and therefore interpret it as a problem, a hindrance on success when in fact it is quite the opposite.

Many celebrities in various realms have challenged and even shattered our preconceptions of introversion. A quick look at a list of well-known introverted personalities can surprise you. You might expect that a successful author such as J.K. Rowling, a technology tycoon like Bill Gates, and even a historical scientist such as Albert Einstein are all considered introverts, but I anticipate a raised eyebrow at the mention that entertainer Christina Aguilera, actress Emma Watson, and world-famous activist Mahatma Gandhi are all introverts. Even historical Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in defiance of social and racial inequality, was known to be shy, soft-spoken, and exhibit an introverted personality. Despite their personalities, all of them have contributed to their fields in ways that most think of only as the result of extroversion. Perhaps this is a consequence of our misunderstanding of what it means to truly be an introvert.

A Little Time Away

Rather than introversion being a term for one who avoids all social interaction, it is a descriptor of one who has a high sensitivity to stimulation, especially social encounters. While extroverts seek out social situations and thrive on such energy, introverts might experience a similar feeling but will quickly find the event draining and require time alone to re-energize. The point here is that introverts can experience a similar sensation from social interactions; they are not simply loaners who want to be left alone in their corner all the time. They might, however, require a break now and again by themselves, with or without their noses in books. If your office introvert did not accept the invitation to the office potluck, it’s not necessarily for a lack of interest in being social. Maybe she’s had her fill of social interaction for the day—but still wants an invitation to the next one.

Instead of pressuring an office introvert to conform to your methods of management or mimic a successful extroverted personality, try to understand that the world looks very different to both sides of the coin. What is exciting to one is scary to the other, while what is comfortable to one might be boring to the other. Introverts do not avoid be engaged but rather interact with their environments differently and sometimes need to seek alternate paths to achieve results in a comfortable manner. If you find yourself working with a co-worker who characterizes introverted tendencies, embrace her for who she is and try to learn how to communicate and connect with her in a way that lets her be herself but achieve mutual goals at the same time. She might just surprise you and jump right into the party.

This post was originally posted on LinkedIn and can be found here.